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Romantic Circles Blog

Folks at Vancouver Island University have created a video detailing their interpretation of William Blake's Printing process. Thanks to Roger Whitson on the NASSR Listserv for alerting us to this video.

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of Romantic Numbers, edited by Maureen N. McLane, a new volume in our Praxis series.

With essays by Matthew F. Wickman, Marjorie Levinson, James Brooke-Smith, John Savarese, Bo Earle, Ron Broglio, and two afterwords by Maureen N. McLane, this volume explores older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable), and it registers an upsurge of interest in formal-language, neurocognitive, and medial-historical approaches.

The six essays of Romantic Numbers invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought.

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The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of America a Prophecy copies B and I. Ten of the fourteen extant copies of America were printed in 1793, the date on its title plate. Copy I, now in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, is from this printing. The eighteen plates of copy I, like those of the other 1793 copies but unlike those of the later copies, were printed on two sides of the leaves, except for the frontispiece and title page (plates 1 and 2), and left uncolored. The plates were printed in greenish-black ink; five lines at the end of the text on plate 4 were masked and did not print, and plate 13 is in its first state. Copy B was printed in 1795 with copy A in the same brownish black ink on one side of the paper, with plate 13 in its second state. Unlike copy A, however, it is uncolored except for gray wash on the title plate. Now in the Morgan Library and Museum, copy B has a very curious history. Its plates 4 and 9, which were long assumed to be original, are in fact lithographic facsimiles from the mid 1870s produced to complete the copy. For a full technical description and history of this copy, see Joseph Viscomi, “Two Fake Blakes Revisited; One Dew-Smith Revealed.” Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G. E. Bentley, Jr. Ed. Karen Mulhallen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 35-78. Copies B and I join six other copies in the Archive, copies E and F (1793), A (1795), M (c. 1807), and O (1821), which altogether represent the full printing history of this illuminated book.

America a Prophecy was the first of Blake's "Continental Prophecies," followed by Europe a Prophecy in 1794, executed in the same style and size but usually colored, and, in 1795, "Africa" and "Asia," two sections making up The Song of Los. Fine and important examples of all three books are in the Archive. Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of America copies B and I are fully searchable and are supported by the Archive's Compare feature. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors' notes, have been applied to copies B and I and to all the America texts previously published.

With the publication of these two copies, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 85 copies of Blake's nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, color printed drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

Due to recent security concerns related to Java browser plugins, the Archive has disabled its Java-based ImageSizer and Virtual Lightbox applications. Users can still view 100 and 300 dpi JPEG images as well as complete transcriptions for all works in the Archive including America copies B and I. Text searching is also still available for all works in the Archive, and image searching remains available for all works except those in preview mode. In the coming months the Archive will implement redesigned pages that restore the features of ImageSizer and the Virtual Lightbox without the use of Java.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

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BYRON: the poetry of politics and the politics of poetry
The 39th International Byron Conference

1-6 July 2013, King’s College London, Strand Campus

Call for papers

This conference will examine Byron’s engagement with politics in the widest sense: as a poet, as a member of the House of Lords, as a commentator on his time, and latterly as a would-be revolutionary.

Academic sessions might include:
Byron and the politics of culture
Political style in Byron’s writing
Byron and the politics of the ‘Other’
Byron and the politics of emergent nations (Italy, Greece, the Americas)
Byron and the House of Lords
Byron and Napoleon
Byron as social satirist
Byron and revolution
Byron as liberal and/or libertine
Byron and religion
Byron and social class
Byron and gender/sexual politics
Byron and British political parties
Byron and imperialism
Byron and celebrity
Byron’s posthumous political influence
The ‘Byron legend’ (construction and/or appropriation)
‘Words and things’ (literature versus action in Byron’s life and work)

Proposals for papers on these and other aspects of Byron and politics, or the politics of Byron’s poetry, are welcome. Please send 250-word proposals by 28 February 2013 to byron.conference@kcl.ac.uk.

Individual presentations must not exceed 20 minutes in length. In order to accommodate the maximum number of presentations in the programme, the organisers hope to include one or more ‘round-table’ discussions around specific themes. Individual contributions to these discussions would typically be of 5-10 minutes. If you would be willing for your proposal to be included in a ‘round-table’ session, please indicate this when you send it. Ready-formed proposals for such sessions, based on a particular theme, timed to last either 90 or 120 minutes, and including a minimum of 4 speakers, will be particularly welcome.

Please note that you should normally be a current member of a national Byron Society in order to present a paper at the conference. For a list of Byron societies worldwide see www.internationalbyronsociety.org

Bursaries for student presenters

Limited funds are available to help selected students meet the cost of presenting a paper at the conference (either as individual speakers or as Round Table participants). If you wish to be considered for one of these, please indicate this clearly in your proposal. Applicants will be contacted in late March and can expect to know the decision of the Academic Committee by mid-April 2013.

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A new, special issue of the Keats-Shelley Journal devoted to the topic "Was There a Literary Regency?" is off the presses.

Here are the contents:

"Introduction: Was There a Literary Regency?" by STUART CURRAN
"Was There a Regency Literature? 1816 as a Test Case" by STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT
"1816 as Literary Year: Three Ways of Looking at a Literary Regency" by SONIA HOFKOSH
"The Year of Reaction: 1816 as Janus-Faced" by JERROLD E. HOGLE
"Some Caveats about Postulating a Regency Literature" by TILAR J. MAZZEO
"The Circulation of Satirical Poetry in the Regency" by GARY DYER
"The Print in Regency Print Culture" by STEVEN E. JONES
"Rethinking Regency Literature: The Case of William Cobbett" by MARK KIPPERMAN
"Broken Soldiers: Public Bodies and Next-of-Kin Notification" by SCOTT KRAWCZYK
"Regency Literature? Regency Libel" by CHARLES MAHONEY
"Robert Southey, Historian of El Dorado" by REBECCA NESVET
"'Must the event decide?': Byron and Austen in Search of the Present" by EMILY ROHRBACH
"Pedlars and Prophets: Jewish Representation in the Regency" by MICHAEL SCRIVENER

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Katherine Singer, former site manager at Romantic Circles, and Nanora Sweet, a former electronic edition editor, have just issued a call for submissions to a special issue of Women's Writing entitled, Beyond Domesticity: Heman's in the Wider World.

Here's more:

Beyond Domesticity: Hemans in the Wider World
A Special Issue of Women’s Writing

Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) was the sole British woman poet to rank alongside male Romantics in publishing and sales before and after her death. She positioned herself as a cosmopolitan writer in major forms on post-Napoleonic topics, later becoming a pioneer in Biedermeier poetics (of privatized, domestic sentiment). This later development has dominated her recovery in contemporary Romanticism, enabling a reconstruction of “domesticity” itself as a discourse. However, domesticity may be as much an artifact of her life and career as a framework for it. In contrast, this special issue of Women’s Writing seeks essays on the alien, the uncanny, and the foreign in Hemans; the readerly, thinkerly, and artistic; the public, topical, and businesslike; the critical and prophetic.

How did Hemans think through the ramifications of the transatlantic and global worlds, in Europe, Canada, the Americas, the Middle East, and beyond? How did she capitalize on settings peripheral to London (Liverpool, Wales, Edinburgh, Dublin) and how develop networks around and beyond them? How did she rethink or refigure history, mediated by her interests in the medieval and the modern, empire and republic, science, travel, and more? Hemans was a skilled and savvy navigator of the literary marketplace, and what more can we understand about her intervention in and reshaping of publication culture, including periodicals and reviews, publishers and editing then and now? How does she establish dialogue with the myriad, uncanny “voices” in her texts, as paratexts and intertexts? Moreover, how does she experiment with poetics, genre, and medium through her play with a slew of forms? Finally, how does Hemans broach the philosophical through her meditations on ethics, protest, and gender? How does she theorize her relationships to male and female poetic influences, associates, and competitors?

Other topics may include but are not limited to the following areas:
· Contention with established institutions such as church, party, university, royalty
· History as drama; motifs of atrocity, exile, captivity, immolation, the scaffold
· Art, ekphrasis, the musical
· Style, lexicon, classical and Romantic poetics, traditional and innovative forms
· Transcendence, the afterlife, skepticism, consciousness, and prophecy

See instructions for authors and attached style sheet on the Women’s Writing website, http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rwow20&pa.... Instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes. For example, place of publication, publisher and date of publication appear in brackets after a book is cited for the first time. Please include an abstract, a brief biographical blurb (approximately 100 words), and six keywords suitable for indexing and abstracting services.

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The New York Society Library has recently completed the online cataloging of its Hammond Collection: 1,152 novels, plays, poetry, and other works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally part of a New England lending library, these volumes date from 1720 to 1847 (bulk dates 1770-1820) and reflect the popular reading interests of those years, including Gothic novels, romances, epistolary fiction, musical comedies, and other genres. A number of these books are quite scarce; in a few cases, the NYSL holds the only known extant copy.

To browse these books as a group in the Library’s catalog: http://library.nysoclib.org/, search by author for “James Hammond’s Circulating Library.”

The New York Society Library is a membership library in New York City, founded in 1754. For more information, please visit their Website: http://www.nysoclib.org/

Our special collections are accessible to members and non-members alike. We invite interested researchers to contact us at rare[underscore]books[at]nysoclib[dot]org.

This edition presents
a rare surviving example of the kind of multimedia production that arose from one of the new
cultural activities of the late eighteenth century—the picturesque and antiquarian tour. It
comprises a facsimile of the manuscript sketch- and scrap-book that Robert Bloomfield made
after his 1807 tour of the Wye, an annotated transcription of the prose tour-journal that he
incorporated into his scrap book, and a collated and annotated text of the poetic versions
of the tour that were published (as The Banks of Wye) in 1811, 1813, and 1823. Also
included are reproductions of the engravings that illustrated the 1811 and 1813
publications, deleted or unadopted passages from the manuscript of the poem, and a selection
of reviews from journals of the time. The whole represents a visually and verbally rich
response to the fashionable tour of the Wye. Bloomfield’s manuscript sketch- and scrap-book
is an example of the newly popular fashion for on-the-spot sketching. Full of self-penned
images of views and ruins, it is a fine example of the visual culture that the English
gentry began to produce and to value, a homemade book to pass around in drawing rooms before
turning either to the latest set of picturesque engravings or to the poetic tour —The
Banks of Wye — that Bloomfield himself issued in print. Bloomfield, indeed, hoped
to issue not just the poetic tour but also the ‘whole triple-page’d Journal, Drawings,
prose, and rhime’. Cost prohibited such a publication at the time: only now, with this
composite edition of poem, prose, scrap- and sketch-book, can we see the multimedia response
to the Wye that was then accessible only to the intimate friends among whom the manuscript
circulated.

This website presents the first scholarly edition
of Robert Southey’s various writings about the prophetic movements of Romantic-era Britain.
Its aim is to throw new light on two related areas: the nature and history of millenarian
prophecy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—especially William Bryan,
Richard Brothers, and Joanna Southcott—, and the significance of prophecy in Southey’s
social, political analysis of his times. A fascinated commentator upon what he termed
‘enthusiasm’, Southey published two of the earliest accounts of Southcott and her
predecessors ever written, accounts derived both from personal acquaintance with some of the
major figures involved and from a detailed study of their writings. These accounts are
reproduced here, collated with the manuscripts on which they were based, and with
explanatory notes. In addition, a selection of Southey’s remarks on millenarians in his
private manuscript correspondence is presented, and an introduction comprising a brief
history of the prophetic movements in the Romantic era and a critical discussion of
Southey’s writings on the subject.

...................

The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and
his Circle. Ed. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt The editors are delighted
to announce an update to their edition of Bloomfield collected letters, comprising four
previously unknown letters that throw new light on Bloomfield's relationship with his
patron, Capel Lofft, and on the patronage of labouring-class poets in the early nineteenth
century more generally. The letters also throw new light on periodical culture in the period
and present an early draft of one of Bloomfield's popular songs.